The game of Mah-Jongg is popular throughout in the world, particularly in Asian countries such as China, Japan and Hong-Kong and the like. Mah-Jongg is usually played with a Mah-Jongg playing table and a predetermined number of Mah-Jongg pais (tiles). When Mah-Jongg is played it is first necessary to shuffle (mix) the Mah-jongg tiles, then necessary to draw up a predetermined numbers of tiles (thirteen tiles) in two rows and thereafter one row of the tiles must be heaped up the other row to form a block of tiles.
An automatic Mah-Jongg playing table has been widely used to carry out the above operations. A known pai arranging apparatus for an automatic Mah-Jongg playing table performs automatically several operations of shuffling the tiles, turning over the tiles, piling up one row of tiles on the other row, preparing four sets of piled up tiles and transferring the piled up tiles on the table for the next play.
The conventional automatic Mah-Jongg playing table comprises a shuffling member for shuffling (mixing) tiles on a tapered portion of a turntable mounted in a hopper, a tile drawing member for absorbing the turned over tiles by a magnet located at a top end of the turntable, a feeding member for feeding the absorbed tiles to a conveyer and a transferring member for transferring the turned over tiles to a waiting table for holding a block of tiles.
In this rotating ring-shaped automatic tile arranging apparatus employing a magnetic force, two kinds of attitude (orientation) correcting members in the form of nail-shaped obstacles are mounted in the hopper, and the attitude (orientation) correcting operation for turning over all tiles can be performed with the turntable by colliding the tiles with the obstacles. Accordingly, a long time interval is required to arrange the tiles whose attitudes are random, and the tiles cannot be transferred to the waiting table effectively. Further, the tiles are damaged by frictional contact when the tiles are drawn to the magnet and when they are disengaged from the magnet. The tiles initially drawn to the rotating ring are disturbed by the following tiles which are concentrated in an absorbing area of the rotating ring and thereby the attitude of the tiles are changed and the tiles are dropped from the rotating ring. Moreover, the attitude of the tiles riding on the belt-conveyer is changed by the vibration of the conveyer and leads to inconvenience in arranging the tiles.